#HackFrancophonie: an open data camp on datasets from French-speaking countries

To illustrate their full potential, Etalab and Open Data Burkina Faso, in partnership with the World Bank, CFI Medias and the Open Government Partnership, ara organising an open data camp - #HackFrancophonie - which is to take place on 19 February 2016 in conjunction with and at the premises ofNUMA (Paris).

At least 8 countries from the French-speaking world and 3 continents will be represented by government teams and local associations working on open data. Participants will bring along, at whatever stage of development, their concrete open data reuse projects, their knowledge of the field and their technical skills.
They will provide their technical data processing and also collaborative data production skills (e.g. geospatial data crowdsourcing) to assist in the development of French-speaking countries, and their data and freeware resources (e.g. data.gouv.fr) will be made available to share.

As joint organiser of the event together with Etalab, the Burkina Faso government team responsible for open data will, for example, seek to consolidate their projects concerning school geolocation, electoral data reuse and adaptation of the cotton sector to climate change. Associations such as Balai citoyen or Social Justice will explore open data applications – using electoral or extractive data, for example – with a view to improving governmental accountability and citizens' access to information.

This day-long collaborative workshop will be divided into two parts:

• From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.: each person wishing to propose a project idea for the day will give a 2‑minute presentation and then participants will be split into around ten teams and will spend the day developing their projects, bringing to them their IT development and data analysis and visualisation skills or their expertise in the sector.
• From 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.: teams will give a presentation of how far they have progressed with their projects, and will, for example, give feedback on the ideas, applications and data visualisations they have covered in the course of the day, in the presence of major international development stakeholders. A drinks reception will follow, to allow networking.

Registration for this public event is open here for the entire day or just for the closing presentations.

By encouraging participants with diverse skills and backgrounds to collaborate, #HackFrancophonie will allow the practical sharing of skills on open data projects.
This day's achievements will help to demonstrate how powerful an instrument open data really is in terms of the development of French-speaking countries and, in the longer term, to create a genuine Error! Invalid hypertext link reference.